NOW FOR THIS NEW THING

I've returned from an internet absence largely compelled by the process of moving house, beginning a new job in an entirely new industry, the arrival and departure of a number of house guests, and the other miscellany. 

I've announced my return with new Fall Colors, because the virtual seasons are otherwise difficult to detect. 

NOW FOR THIS NEW THING: my honest engine reason for not posting anything for some long while has been my inability to determine how to proceed. There are different ways of saying the same and different things. Saying things differently. So an ongoing presentation determining the difference is the solution. I'll be posting in different colors:

White facts & white opinions. 

Pink poetic or abstract. 

Light blue nearly meaningless.

1 Week ago, I went to Brooklyn to investigate The Poetry Brothel, a gallery/ club of sorts. Its run by folks calling themselves The Madame and Tennessee Pink. The fundamental concept is a venue offering rooms laden with pillows and fabrics, wherein poetry is read to you by poets dressed in sexier than usual garb. It all suggested more 80's & 90's theater than any kind of discernible poetics, though I'm told they're mostly students from the New School MFA Program. $10 buys you admission, a gold plastic coin good for a private reading with a Poetry Whore (fresh from The Madame's Finishing School for Poetry Whores), and a green plastic coin for Absinthe (still the official drink of olympic poetry!).  Also included, The Poetry Brothel program, which amounts to a list of cast (character) biographies, acknowledgements, and advertisements for 3 workshops: 

A Finishing School for Poetry Whores: "geared toward the development of a poetry "whore" persona through the writing and workshopping of a small body of poetry for this alter-ego." 

Theories of Poetic  Enunciation: participants "focus on finding the more resonant qualities of our own voices," beginning with a study of the poetry of the "great masters."

Tarot and Poetry: "poets in this workshop will come to understand ways to incorporate into their work the still, small voice that is so easily hushed and disregarded in daily life."

These are six-week sessions. Want more? "all of our instructors are also available for private, one-on-one consultations. These are recommended for those with an existing body of poetic work and a desire for some length, indepth feedback on it. Consultation Fee: $100 per 2 hours."

My blog reading fee is $600 per post read (& it's still a better deal). 

So maybe most poets are no longer nearly so eccentric as history suggests certain dead poets were. That's no reason to go running around charging people to develop  stock strange artists. These workshopped poetic personas consist of 1 paragraph bio descriptions, toting pre-war stylings, exoticism, orientalism, EVEN MODERNISM. Each one has a list of influences beneath: Arthur Rimbaud, William Shakespeare, Wallace Stevens, Bly, Hass, Kunitz, William Carlos Williams, Silvia Plath, Theodore Roethke, T.S. Eliot, Emily Dickinson, John Keats, Frank O'Hara, Edgar Allan Poe, Oscar Wilde, Dorothy Parker, John Ashbery, Charles Bukowski, Walt Whiman, Gerard Manley Hopkins, W.H Auden, Russel Edson, Robert Creeley, Anne Waldman, Margaret Atwood, Ezra Pound, Anne Sexton, Anne Carson, and Salinger. 

This would not be my starting line-up. It almost reads like a "Much Loved Poets and Writers" coffee table collection. Hard-bound. Massive. Shiny. Black.  

Though, amongst the lot of them, they also managed to include: Gertrude Stein, e.e. cummings, William Burroughs, James Joyce, Richard Brautigan, Lyn Hejinian, Alice Notely, and Anna Akhmatova. 

Other odd notables included: Tom Waits, Marilyn Monroe, and Edith Piaf. 

What I liked (& would like to see at other poetry events):

-inclosed front patio replete with odd lounging furniture and friendly faces

-a charming well-dressed Maitre'De

-alcohol besides wine

-an accordion player serenading between acts

-art on the walls

-attractive environs

-the idea of private readings within a larger reading

-generally friendly and approachable people

-a large constituent of women reading and listening

-Queer Friendly

What I didn't like (& am even somewhat vexed by);

-bad accents (it only makes it more difficult to care about what is being said)

-costumes (as opposed developing your "character" and subsequent aesthetic within the parameters of day to day living)

-absinthe (I love the drink, but it comes with so much baggage, and they were more interested in the baggage than the drink).

- "Poetry Whores" (as a title, the result is neither sexy enough, nor exploitive enough. Think School of Quietude in fishnet stockings and patent leather heels). Cheesecake Gluck!

- temperature (too hot to contemplate so much personal narrative)

Perhaps if the focus were set more upon the "poetry" and less upon the "brothel." Perhaps if there were less emphasis on kitsch Lit history, and more upon the spirit of experiment with venue, text and performance. 

Should have gone to TIM PETERSON  the should've shid. I saw peterson on youtube smash his club on IOWA's creative MFAce. It made sense. I think he's as intelligent as he sounds, but he has strong feelings about some poets he knows. 

PAOLO JAVIER left to teach in Miami, an associate prof on perm VAY-K. Many people visit my blog in search of PAOLO JAVIER. Keep Coming. 

ITTk looks like a dumb truck full of TT. TTap Dance. Ta Ta Tap Tap ap laPDAnce LAPDance. Ignant words doggy up my flexis mooch. Up in their towel wrapped a  fat sperm whale. 

To gurlesque, make bugwords CUM! THIP! CRISH! PHUSH! Prack ... to star in John McC[[l]]ain and William Moor Lie Hard with a Variance.

Paolo Javier read his poems on Saturday at Segue

Paolo Javier (editor of 2nd Avenue) & Samuel R. Delaney (renown lit critic & sci-fi writer) read yesterday at the Bowery Poetry Club as part of the ongoing Segue Series facilitated by Tim Peterson. 

I've been wanting to go to the series for some time, but couldn't conjure up the initiative until Paolo invited me. Added incentive was Walter Lew being in town & all of us going out for drinks afterward. 

I arrived immediately after the reading began, just as Tim Peterson finished up his introduction of Paolo. Despite still having my bag slung over my shoulder, my jacket on, and not yet having found a seat, I felt comfortable and at east as Paolo's voice and presence filled the stage. He is speaks causally, not so differently than he does in person, but in both cases he manages to maintain an intelligent tone. His language is informal, but not colloquial; it is relaxed, but not unstructured. 

The work he presented was culled from a diverse set of projects, some in progress, some complete. He mentioned his regret that he wouldn't be able to share much of his recent work, as it involved multiple mediums (& presumably technology he did not currently have at his disposal). One such project I had the pleasure of experiencing in progress and completion, when several months ago he performed as part of shadoWord productions, a kind of improvised reworking of written text in response to real time drawings being produced by Ernest Concepcion and Mike Estabrook on overhead projectors. 

This kind of formalist dynamism is also present in Paolo's unaccompanied readings. After informing us that he'd become interested in the practice(s) of private languages, he read a long poem utilizing his adaptation of "baby talk." It sounds terribly obnoxious, and it would be if he chose not to stop short of complicating the possibilities of otherwise generally dismissed utterances. A later poem somehow brought together Bill Murray and Hans Arp, though I think Hans Arp was used primarily as some kind of adjective or verb.

He often addresses a kind of Beloved in his poem, which lends itself (as well as continues to define) his casual tone(s). He is also aware of his romantic  (i.e. Blake/Shelley &/or a dozen red roses) tendencies, but never sinks into smarmy sentiment or saccharine schmaltz. 

He does sometimes use profanity. Mainly shit, and the occasional fuck. They aren't excessive in quantity, but whether it's Paolo's work, or anyone else's, I still can't reconcile the use of profanity with its various poetic applications. I suppose the argument might follow, if you are a writer who adopts a conversational tone (or creates a conversation in your poem), it follows that the language of your conversations could ostensibly be sustainably practiced in your conversational renderings of thoughts and things. I understand the logic, I think. But never the less, whether I'm reading alone or being read to, I'm often disoriented by casual profanity. I sometimes miss the following three lines because I'm still trying to reconcile what that 'shit' means. I want to emphasize "casual" profanity. In cases where the poem itself addresses, or is in some spirit of, the profane, the 'rules' must be very different. 

That said, Paolo's reading wasn't at all disrupted by his minimal use of casual profanity, so perhaps my point is null. 

After the reading, I met Jill Magi, editor of Sona Books, who recently published a chapbook written and drawn by Paolo and Ernest Concepcion. I bought the book & have read it. The Cut-&-Paste poetry/imagery combo reminds me of the Bee & Bernstein books put out by Granary Books. As with Paolo & Ernest's shadoWord collaboration, it is difficult to determine which came first, the picture or the text. The text is minimal, never much more than 12 words on a page. They read more like captions, headlining or underlining Ernest's comically and sexually surreal urban aquatic line drawings. They are available at SonaWeb. 

Afterward, a group of us walked to whatever the name of the rather nondescript restaurant at 9 Stanton is. It was a fine group of people. All of them intelligent, but not pretending toward anything. Everyone was comfortable, each of us exchanging ideas and questions, occasionally toasting to health and Paolo's success. 

Anne Tardos, who a previous mentor of mine spoke highly of, sat to my left. I payed her end of the tab in exchange for a copy of the Dik-dik's Solitude, which she has promised to send me. It is a very large book and well worth a meal. 

Walter Lew, up from the University of Miami, broke his eyeglasses for the first time in his life. I fixed them. He's currently working on a unique and complicated project called The Ga-Guhm Poems. 

I also met Cecilia Wu who co-edits critiphoria, a new online journal with an ambitious statement of purpose. Their first issue is Very Big, and includes work by more than FIVE writers I've enjoyed reading. This is a good journal to watch (& read).  

This was an excellent night. My wife even thought so, & she is a fierce critic of gatherings with academic undertones (overtones). And we should all be, since they're generally intimidating and tense, all those inflated skulls smacking against each other. Such a racket.

I felt as if I'd stumbled into a community, though a reading series isn't necessarily a community. It is, at heart, a stage. Still, I intend to go to readings more often after a success like this one.